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Wednesday, December 28, 2011

His name is Irish Jimmy Gallagher, and he checks in at 6'3" and 225 pounds. A boxer with dancing green eyes and a wit born of the Blarney Stone, Jimmy is a hell of a fella, quick with a laugh and quicker with the jab.

But if you foul him, stand back, because all the laughs will die in fury.

It's Los Angeles, 1955. A time of relative peace in the nation. The Korean War has ended, Eisenhower is in the White House and in the City of Angels life goes on.

And down by the river is a "smoker," a privately set-up boxing match where Jimmy hopes to make a couple hundred bucks. With his girl, Ruby, waiting tables at Charley's, Jimmy can always use a little extra scratch. What he can't abide is a mobster trying to fix a fight. But what can one man do against a local crime boss and his team of thugs? Especially after they've arranged to have Jimmy Gallagher clobbered by Iron Hands?

A fighting fool of a sailor, with a mania for airplanes and red-headed sweethearts—that was Sinbad! Dumb in many ways, perhaps, but dumb like a fox with that left hand of his! Another whirlwind of laughs and leather, featuring the great Roland Rigormortis.

Set in pre-flood New Orleans this novel explores the world of women's boxing through the eyes and hands of a young business school dropout.

What it does is it dances. It comes rushing at you with blazing red speed, yet at unexpected moments, turns you with feline grace. Heidi Whitehill, the enigmatic main character of German-Polish descent who leaves the business world to pursue professional boxing, will first demand your attention, then command it, inspiring you to risk all and fight, work to finish what you need to finish, so you can finally be free.

Based on Dr. William Russo's popular and long-standing college course, Great Sports Stories is an overview of the conflicts, tales, plots, characters, and actions, that comprise the most significant sports films of the past century. From famous literary athletics to the politically incorrect tales of sport, from distant past games to professionals of the modern age, the book covers them all. If you want a definitive guide to winners and losers among the movie sports scene, you have found it.

Masashi reluctantly decides to finance his film by fighting in a series of no-rules bouts with 3 club fighters. The deck is stacked against him as Kenji, his own sensei, is secretly plotting Masashi’s demise. Can High Karate triumph over street fighting?

It’s an opportunity a journalist and ex-boxer with a complicated personal life can’t turn down - joining the camp of the world title challenger, Ricky Mallon, in the run-up to the championship fight. For Billy Piers it’s more than work, it’s an escape from Karen, loving and beautiful but disturbed, and unaware of what he’s going through - that he’s in love with someone else, someone who can’t decide who she’s in love with at all.

Set in the urban wastelands of Scotland in the 1980s, The Champion’s New Clothes is about love and friendship, loneliness and violence, from the brutality of the boxing ring to the cruelty that goes hand in hand with romance. As Ricky trains for the hardest fight of his life, Billy faces the hardest decision of his. Both men are driven by desire, and both men come to realize that nothing is ever what it seems. With wit and acute honesty, The Champion’s New Clothes warns: Beware of what you want. You might get it.

Sam Pennington's life has fallen apart. Since his father's death, he's lost his home, his Mum's started drinking and they've been dumped in a dismal housing estate in East London.

Jerry Ambrose, on the other hand, has got everything together. After a turbulent early life, a new-found faith has helped him reconcile his past, and dedicate his life to helping others.

But when a street fight leads Sam to Jerry's boxing club, both their futures are thrown into question. As Jerry reaches out to Sam, an extraordinary talent emerges - a talent that re-opens the wounds of Jerry's own life.

Can Sam be saved from his rage? Or will Jerry's re-awakended ambition tear them both apart? Set in East London during the 1990s, The Fight is a gritty story of two desperate struggles: The battle over a man's past. And the fight for a boy's future.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Felony Fists is a tight, streamlined brawler of a novel, heavy on ring action and spare jabbing prose. It’s hard not to use boxing analogies when talking about it. Series co-creator Paul Bishop is Jack Tunney this time out, and he sets a high standard for the Jack Tunneys to follow. His invocation of L.A. in the ‘50’s is vivid and well-researched without being overwhelming, and his grasp on the strange, sometimes seedy world of boxing is spot-on …”

Sunday, December 18, 2011

I’ve mentioned Jeremy Brown’s novel Suckerpunch quite a bit recently – mostly because it’s the best crime novel I’ve read this year. I got it touch with Jeremy and asked him to do an interview on Bish’s Beat, and he’s provided an insightful take on his approach as a writer and on Suckerpunch and it’s coming sequel.

Q1: What is the novel’s version of a fighter’s stats when applied to Suckerpunch?

Suckerpunch is a lean and mean crime thriller set in the world of Las Vegas mixed martial arts. The narrator, Aaron “Woodshed” Wallace, is in a constant battle of “head or gut.” Is he going to use his head and distance himself from his shady past and the criminals who want to drag him back in, or is he going to go with his gut – the one that put him next to those criminals in the first place?

Q2: While becoming more popular, fiction using an MMA background must have been almost unheard of when you started writing Suckerpunch. What brought your writing into the cage?

It’s true — MMA was pretty scarce in the fiction world when I started this project in 2006. It had infiltrated the non-fiction market with fighter biographies, but I still had to explain to my agent at the time what MMA meant, and why it was (and still is) a great world for thriller novels.

I’d tried writing the Aaron Wallace character before, going back to scenes I wrote for fiction workshops in college in the late 90s. Wallace started out as a self-defense instructor/vigilante, but there wasn’t any steam behind that approach. When I revisited him in 2006, MMA was getting a huge surge from Japan’s Pride Fighting Championships and the UFC, especially its new reality show The Ultimate Fighter. I was watching and loving all this MMA, and decided to throw Wallace in the cage to see how he did. That was the one big piece I needed to get the story going. I still needed two more, and we’ll get to them soon.

Q3: Suckerpunch is subtitled Round One, indicating the first in a series. Did you always perceive Woodshed Wallace as a series character?

Yes, I liked the idea of following this character while he tries to fight his way out of his past and to the top of the MMA food chain. The series is designed for five books, the same number of rounds in a championship MMA fight.

Q4: Do you have a background in MMA as a fighter or a fan?

I’ve been a fan of MMA since UFC 1 in 1993, when Royce Gracie showed the world what Brazilian Jiu Jitsu could do. I never planned to compete in MMA, but the training and skills fascinated me. I trained in judo, jeet kune do, BJJ, and various close-quarter combat stick and knife arts. Most of the stuff I trained was for self-defense – filthy, nasty stuff – which informed Woody’s street fighting background. I enjoy the scenes where he has to battle his street muscle memory in order to stay within the rules of MMA.

Q5: As a writer how do you help readers understand MMA fighting?

Bottom line, I want the story to be entertaining. These fights and fighters can be so technical, breaking down a play-by-play could read like a flowchart on combat chess. Possibly interesting to MMA die-hards, but it would turn off most readers.

So, I try to throw enough MMA detail in – technique, cause and effect, terminology, culture – to show the reader what’s happening and why without drowning them in minutia. I think it works best to have the characters convey that information through action and dialogue, but there’s no way these guys would stand around explaining everything to each other. They’re so close to it and each other they speak in shorthand and code, so the action and dialogue have to work together.

For example, Woody dives in to take his sparring partner down. Gil says, “Watch the guillotine.” Woody pulls his opponent’s forearm away from his throat so he can keep breathing. Good – now we know a guillotine is a forearm choke.

Q6: What would you say to those of us who are traditional boxing fans to give MMA a chance to grow on us?

I started as a boxing fan (actually, I started as a ninja fan, but they aren’t on pay-per-view), and as soon as I saw MMA I thought, “It’s like boxing, but with kicks and chokes and broken arms? Even better!” Here are just a few reasons to cross to the dark side:

1. Fighters who finish fights are promoted. Those who fight for points are not – usually because they get finished by the other guys.

2. MMA delivers the fights fans want to see. There are some match-ups that don’t happen or happen too late in careers, but for the most part the guys who should fight, do.

3. MMA is safer. The smaller gloves allow one-punch knockouts rather than 12-round bludgeonings, and there are no standing eight counts that let boxers keep fighting when they should not.

4. Don King is not in MMA.

Q7: Did you see the recent MMA film Warrior and, if so, what did you think?

I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m looking forward to it. The first batch of MMA films were mostly Rocky or The Karate Kid set in MMA, so I was excited to see this one come along. At the same time, it scares me. I think I’m going to watch it and go, “Damn, why didn’t I think of that?”

Q8: You began your professional writing career with a series for young adults, Crime Files: Four Minute Forensic Mysteries. How did writing the Crime Files series lead to Suckerpunch?

I never thought I’d write for kids or young adults, but the Crime Files opportunity was perfect for me. They wrapped up and that’s when I decided to revisit the Aaron Wallace character. Like I said before, this was a guy who needed his story told, but I hadn’t figured out how to tell it. Putting him inside the cage was the first step. Then I read Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and it knocked me like a sap in the temple. As soon as I started writing it as a noir crime thriller, the story poured onto the page. That was the second big piece.

The third came with the title. The martial arts instructor I was training with had a private seminar called The Art of the Suckerpunch. I thought, How cool is that? Something so nasty can have an art to it. And bam, there was the title and the final piece I needed to get rolling.

Q9: What was the path you followed to get Suckerpunch published?

Twisty, with lots of switchbacks and dead ends. I changed agents, then rewrote everything except the first chapter with an entirely new plot and characters. We submitted it to editors who loved it – with just a few major changes here and there – and they presented it to publishers who passed. It was very frustrating to get so close again and again, but it made the story stronger.

When Medallion Press picked it up in the summer of 2010, I was thrilled. The people there love the story and characters, and there are quite a few MMA fans on the staff. They’ve all been fantastic.

Q10: As MMA continues to grow in popularity has the sport provided you with an outlet to promote Suckerpunch?

I believe so – I don’t have to explain what MMA is nearly as much as I used to, and usually just mentioning the UFC is sufficient. We ran ads on the popular MMA site Sherdog.com and I dream of seeing my book cover on the canvas of a UFC event, but that will have to wait for a bigger advertising budget.

I hope it’s been a mutually beneficial relationship, where MMA fans come across my book and share it with non-fans (ahem, Bish), who check out the sport and get hooked. But I also want readers who couldn’t care less about MMA to enjoy the story. I’ve had readers who haven’t seen one 4oz punch get thrown tell me they couldn’t put the book down, which is great.

Q11: As a writer, how do you sustain a series of novels focused around a fighter without always having to lead up to the ‘big fight,’ or is leading up to the ‘big fight’ part of the attraction?

Great question. Any ideas? Because the novels are crime thrillers first and MMA thrillers second, I get to make the climax something other than the big fight. The fight is certainly vital to the story, and Woody has to win (so far), but the stories are about more than what happens in the cage. It’s fun to find ways to tie the big fight in with the other conflicts going on in the story to make it bigger than a number on Woody’s win/loss sheet.

I also try to treat the fights like a compact mystery, with foreshadowing, twists, and misdirection. Woody is trying to solve the mystery before his opponent, and they both know what it means to figure it out a second too late.

Q12: What’s up next for Woodshed Wallace in Round Two?

Round Two is titled Hook and Shoot, and it picks up seven weeks after the final scene in Suckerpunch:

Woodshed Wallace has fought to survive his entire life. He thinks the big break from MMA promotion Warrior is going to change all that, and he’s right – now he has to make sure Banzai Eddie and Warrior don’t get snuffed out by the yakuza.

If the yakuza can’t collect on the debt Eddie owes, they’ll take payment in blood –and it doesn’t matter whose. Woody has no choice but to help Eddie and his ex-SAS bodyguard, Mr. Burch, stay alive and keep Warrior intact.

Serves Woody right for trusting Eddie and thinking he was off the hook for his past. He should know by now what happens with hooks: when you drop back onto them, they go twice as deep.

Thanks to Jeremy Brown for getting in the cage with Bish’s Beat.

As I said at the start of the interview, Suckerpunch is one of the most entertaining novels with one of the most engaging lead characters to come to the attention of Bish’s Beat this year. Pin down a copy for yourself, now!

No head butts, groin strikes, eye gouges, or fishhooks. He'd go along with it, but heavyweight mixed martial artist Aaron "Woodshed" Wallace thinks they're taking all the fun out of fighting. Stuck on no-name cards for tiny organizations, Woody is trying to put his shady past behind him with help from his trainer and mentor, Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt Gil Hobbes.

When Banzai Eddie Takanori--president of MMA's largest organization, Warrior Inc.--offers Woody a short-notice fight against a highly favored poster boy, Woody sees his shot at salvation. By the time he realizes he's just a pawn in a high-stakes game between psychopaths, he's in way too deep.

JAMES REASONER TAKES ON THE LATEST FIGHT CARD ENTRY SPLIT DECISION OVER AT HIS ROUGH EDGES BLOG . . .

. . . Beetner's tale is darker than either of the preceding entries, but it's just as compelling and does a fine job of capturing the era. He has the knack of putting his protagonist in an impossible situation and then making the reader race along to find out how it's going to get even worse. Split Decision is a prime example of the sort of variety and adventurous storytelling we can expect from the Fight Card series, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Highly recommended.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

This quartet of DVDs takes a most cool look inside the styles and science of every kind of fighting …

FIGHT QUEST

Travel the globe with American fighters Jimmy Smith and Doug Anderson as they struggle to learn new hand-to-hand combat disciplines from top masters and embrace traditional cultures in each riveting episode of Fight Quest.

Jimmy and Doug are given only five days to study the brutal art of stick-fighting in the Philippines (Kali), Israeli military Krav Maga defense techniques and so much more before facing off against local expert fighters in this action-packed, graphic journey to explore the deadliest martial arts on Earth.

The History Channel’s Human Weapon is hosted by martial arts fighter Jason Chambers and former football pro Bill Duff. They put their bodies on the line in every episode while providing an entertaining and informative narrative on every style of fighting they learned.

At the end of each episode one of the two hosts take on a master in the martial art they just learned.

National Geographic reveals the science behind mixed martial arts, special operations and self-defense in Fight Science. From martial artists who defy what many people think is humanly possible - to elite military units trained to become ultimate warriors - to masters of self-defense who teach how to fight for your life, Fight Science analyzes how these experts generate the power and speed behind each move.

Featuring amazing visuals and spectacular CGI that has become of the Fight Science legend, National Geographic reveals the secrets of some of the most powerful fighting techniques in the world and explores the incredible physiology and training of fighting masters.

DEADLIEST WARRIOR

Finally, Spike’s newest hit show, Deadliest Warrior, has arrived on DVD! Watch as the most feared warriors civilization has ever known are pitted against each other in battle.

Using 21st century science and the latest in CGI technology, each episode enlists warrior-specific world-class fighters and experts to analyze every facet of their unique skills of destruction and to answer the all-important question: who is the deadliest warrior?

WARRIORS

Go inside the cultures of the most famous warriors of all time as host Terry Schappert, a Green Beret, explores the weaponry, tactics, training, and psyches of history s greatest fighting men.

Every episode of Warriors tells the dramatic tales of iconic warrior cultures the Vikings, Aztecs, Barbarians including the rituals, technologies, and strategies that made them so mighty. From Spartans to samurai, Zulus to medieval knights, Schappert fully immerses himself in these warrior cultures, experiencing firsthand their fighting techniques and testing their weapons. See the pre-battle rituals, initiations, and battlefield approaches of the Mayan warriors a force that relied on human sacrifice, bizarre ceremonies, and deadly weapons.

Uncover the weapons and tactics that led to a shocking Barbarian victory against the Roman army. Learn the secrets and traditions of the elite and mysterious warriors who for centuries ruled Japan. And explore in each episode a climactic battle that showcases the warriors strengths, weaknesses, and life-and-death struggles.

Walking in the footsteps of history s greatest warriors proves to be a gut-wrenching experience, but it s all part of Schappert s amazing journey to discover the heart of a warrior.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Suckerpunch, Jeremy Brown’s outstanding debut novel, is a visceral thrill-ride through the world of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). His character, Aaron ‘Woodshed’ Wallace, is as tough as they come – an MMA fighter with more heart than sense, but a man you would always choose to cover your back. He’s trying to change, trying to overcome the harsh life and mistakes in his past, and is well aware he is often his own worst enemy. But he also knows two other things; he can fight, and he can win...

In Suckerpunch, Brown provides a no-holds-barred, straight-ahead action tale. His prose is as stripped down and powerful as the fighters and situations he writes about. Things go from bad to worse, and then much worse, for Woodshed as Brown tells his tale, before he provides the much anticipated fight and follow-up for the readers’ satisfaction.

There were times I found myself wondering how Brown, the writer, was going to get Woodshed, the fighter, out of the incredibly dangerous corners into which he’d been painted. With as many action novels as I’ve read, this was an unusual occurrence – and I enjoyed every agonizing second of it. But the best part was Brown didn’t falter or crush my ‘suspension of disbelief’ as his plot unfolded toward its resolution.

Suckerpunch is not just an excellent debut novel, it’s an excellent novel period. I’m certainly going to be rooting for both Brown and Woodshed when round two is published in 2012.

ALMOST ALL OF THE LATE STUART KAMINSKY'S BRILLIANT NOVELS WERE RELEASED AS E-BOOKS TODAY BY MYSTERIOUS PRESS. DOWN FOR THE COUNT WAS A FORAY INTO FIGHT FICTION FOR HIS '40S PRIVATE EYE TOBY PETERS ... FUN STUFF ...

Heavyweight champ Joe Louis did not want to find a dead body today. After passing the afternoon with a woman who is not his wife, he’s jogging on the beach when he sees two men standing over a corpse. He raises his fists, and they run. Toby Peters is even more sorry to see the body than Louis, for in a way, the dead man is family. Toby’s ex-wife called him that morning, begging him to find her husband, who had disappeared after a week of threats on his life. This was not the way she wanted him found.

Peters agrees to help Louis stay out of the papers while he investigates the murder. But when he learns that the dead man had lately taken a serious interest in boxing, a connection to Joe Louis starts to look like a fatal mistake.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Jimmy Wyler is a fighter punching his way straight to the middle. All he wants is to make enough dough to buy his girl, Lola, a ring. And maybe make the gang back at St. Vincent’s orphanage proud.

A slick mobster named Cardone has an offer for Jimmy – money, and lots of it – for a fix. Jimmy takes the fight. The ring is almost on Lola’s finger, until Jimmy collides with Whit – another mobster with another up-and-coming fighter.

Whit has an offer of his own. Same fight, different fix. Now Jimmy is caught between two warring factions of the Kansas City underworld. He can’t make a move without someone getting mad, getting even, or getting dead.

From sweat-soaked fight halls to darkened alleyways, the countdown has begun. With his girl and his manager in the crossfire, everything Jimmy ever learned about fancy footwork and keeping his defenses up may not be enough …

Fight night is approaching and nobody is going to be saved by the bell.

Monday, December 12, 2011

KNOWN AS THE HOBOKEN HOODLUM, FRANK SINATRA WAS THE SON OF BOXER MARTY O'BRIEN, MANAGER OF BOXER CISCO ANDRADE, AND A CLOSE FRIEND OF BOXING TRAINER AL SILVANI. OH, YEAH, SINATRA ALSO SANG AND DANCED . . .

Sunday, December 11, 2011

1952: Merchant seaman Terry Farrell's dad has been murdered in an illegal boxing ring in LA. Returning home, Terry straps on his old man's gloves and demands a shot at the title. But he doesn't know that he's stepping into the ring with a true monster. Count 10 and DIE!

DAVID FOSTER GIVES THE LOWDOWN ON FIGHT CARD: THE CUTMAN OVER AT HIS PERMISSION TO KILL BLOG . . .

. . . In stories such as these, the starting points, and the end points are not really important. It is the journey along the way, and The Cutman is a great read, I could almost feel the oppressive Cuban heat, and smell the booze, sweat and smoke in the waterfront dives. And the story builds to a beautiful (and brutal) climax – the aforementioned fight between Flynn and Simbari, which has enough twists and turns in it, to keep most readers, if not on the edge of their seat, then at least on their toes, and dodging from side to side . . .

So far as I know, it's been quite a while since fiction like this has been available, and I'm pretty stoked that it's making a comeback.

Felony Fists is an installment in the new pulp Fight Card series by "Jack Tunney." For you armchair fight historians out there, that nome de plume is exactly what you suspect it is--a fusion between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, though the series takes place in the '50s, not the '20s.

Patrick "Felony" Flynn is an LA beat cop who is also possibly the world's most seasoned amateur middleweight. He's offered a spot on the detective squad if he'll help knock gangster Mickey Cohen out of boxing. That means he has to move up in weight to light-heavy, turn pro, and check Cohen's fighter Solomon King's ascent toward a title shot against Archie Moore (who really was light-heavyweight champ at that time, and quite an extraordinary man). A middleweight moving up to fight a badass light-heavyweight is a monumental chore all by itself, but in case the reader doesn't appreciate that, the pressure is heaped upon Felony Flynn increasingly right up until the last chapter.

Friday, December 9, 2011

Terry was too much woman for too many men. First there was promoter Frank Chelsea. He could make or break a fighter with a single word – but he couldn't find the word to satisfy Terry.

Next came virile, handsome Jimmy Biddle. He was a small-time fighter headed for the top when he met her – and she betrayed him.

Last there was brilliant, sophisticated George Strand. He introduced her to the world of the intellect – and she outsmarted him.

Terry took what she wanted from each of them and gave her body in return. But there was one she couldn't forget.

RINGSIDE JEZEBEL

BRUTE MEN AND EAGER WOMEN

Women and sweat are the rewards of a fighter who makes the grade . . . sometimes his only rewards.

The sweat comes naturally. The women flock around the ringsides, the dressing-room doors, eager for the tough of a successful fighter's hard muscles and surging manhood . . . and the money he makes in an evening and spend the same night . . . The sweat does a man good.

The women are often his ruin, the most deadly pleasures, the most poisonous delights a man can get himself involved in . . . That's the kind of girl Terry was . . . a girl with the smell of battling men in her pretty nostrils, the taste of their kisses on her beautiful lips, the feel of their money in her dainty hands.

When Jimmy Biddle met Terry his career as a prizefighter reached its peak . . . and so did his life as a man . . . because nobody who met Terry was ever the same again.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

ONE OF MY FAVORITE MOVIES OF THE YEAR ... EXCELLENT ACTING (ESPECIALLY TOM HARDY) ... NICK NOLTE WILL BE OVERLOOKED FOR A BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR NOMINEE, BUT HE DESERVES ONE ... AVAILABLE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY DECEMBER 20TH. IT'S ON MY CHRISTMAS LIST ...

Crimson Ring is the story of a club fighter, Seamus Muldoon, holder of the New York Boxing Association heavyweight belt, no less, who tries to piece together the reasoning behind the horrific murder of his girlfriend and her racehorse. The trail leads him to exciting adventures on the Brooklyn waterfront and in rural South Carolina, and back to the mean streets of Queens, New York, as he and his rumpled NYPD detective mentor uncover a devious plot of murder and greed. All this while he is preparing for the most important fight of his career.

He has never fit into either world: the Moscondagas on the Reservation see him as white; whites see him as Indian. So far, Sonny's managed to harness his anger -- what he calls "the monster" – in the boxing ring. But Sonny wants out of the Res. He's headed for New York City, where nobody can tell him what to do.

Sonny doesn't count on stepping into the middle of a drug war when he gets there – or on tangling with a tough Harlem boxer-turned-cop named Alfred Brooks. Brooks seems to think that Sonny's got the talent to make it to the top – to be a contender. But first Sonny's got to learn to be smart, take control of his life, and beat the monster. Only it isn't as easy as it sounds...

Alfred Brooks is scared. He's a highschool dropout and his grocery store job is leading nowhere. His best friend is sinking further and further into drug addiction. Some street kids are after him for something he didn't even do.

So, Alfred begins going to Donatelli's Gym, a boxing club in Harlem that has trained champions. There he learns it's the effort, not the win, that makes the man – that last desperate struggle to get back on your feet when you thought you were down for the count.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

THE ICONIC MCQUEEN – ALWAYS COOLER THAN COOL – IN SHOTS FROM LIFE MAGAZINE – LOOKING A LOT LIKE I IMAGINED FELONY FLYNN WOULD . . .

ABOVE: PARAMOUNT'S NEW HEAVYWEIGHT . . .

McQueen works out at the gym at Paramount Pictures, for whom he was making the movie Love With the Proper Stranger opposite Natalie Wood. Perhaps a signal of their confidence that he was the next big thing, Paramount's suits also gave McQueen a plum dressing room on the lot: one that belonged to Gary Cooper.

Cal and his trainer, Riley, are on their way to Mexico for a make-or-break rematch with legendary fighter Rivera. Four years ago, Cal became the only mixed martial arts fighter to take Rivera the distance -- but the fight nearly ended him. Only Riley, who has been at his side for the last ten years, knows how much that fight changed things for Cal. And only Riley really knows what's now at stake, for both of them.

Katie Kitamura's brilliant and stirring debut novel follows Cal and Riley through the three fraught days leading up to this momentous match, as each privately begins to doubt that Cal can win. As the tension builds toward the final electrifying scene, the looming fight becomes every challenge each of us has ever taken on, no matter how uncertain the outcome.

In hypnotic, pared-down prose, The Longshot offers a striking portrait of two men striving to stay true to themselves and each other in the only way they know how.

“Yup, the guy’s a beast. But it’s alright. I haven’t been scared since Ricky broke my arm in sixth grade. Anything less than a broken arm is just hurt, and I’ve found out plenty of times that hurt goes away.”

Kicked off the wrestling team, his hopes for another State championship crushed, Ross LeClaire's anger reaches the boiling point. He needs to keep training, build up his skills, be ready for the beat-down his big brother Ricky's sure to have planned when he comes back home in a few months.

A new Mixed Martial Arts gym run by a quiet guy with an attitude just may be the answer. There are only three fighters training there, but every one of them can take Ross out with their eyes closed, and have no problem proving it. Can he handle the back-breaking workouts and bone-jarring training the guys at the gym throw at him?

Then there's Erin, the girl he's known since he was a kid, who just might be turning into something more. How will she react when she finds out he's spending the better part of every day learning how to beat guys up in a cage?

Harry Charles Witwer (1890-1929), more commonly known as H. C. Witwer, was an American short story author. He worked in odd jobs-errand boy for a butcher, prize fighter manager, and a soda jerk on Broadway-for a time before starting to write for newspapers, counting the St. Cloud (Florida) Tribune and New York newspapers Brooklyn Eagle, the New York American, the New York Mail, and The Sun as employers.

In 1917-during World War I- he was sent to France by Collier''s magazine as a war correspondent. He also wrote for McClure''s in this time period. By the early 1920s, Witwer''s works were starting to be filmed, with nearly 30 film credits recorded by 1925. He is credited with producing ten shorts, but he was most active as a writer, receiving writing credits for 30 more short films, after 1925.

Most notable during his lifetime for his baseball and boxing stories, Witwer wrote around 400 stories and articles for magazines and 125 film treatments throughout his career. His works include: From Baseball to Boches (1918), Alex the Great (1919) and Kid Scanlan (1920).

Left alone for days on end, twelve-and-a-half-year-old Wyatt Reaves burns down the family house. His parents lose everything—including control—so Wyatt’s uncle, Spade, whisks him away to "safety."

Spade may not feel tenderly toward his strapping nephew, but he does see potential in the boy: To earn money. In the bare-fist fighting racket. The two travel across America for the next six years, living off Wyatt’s earnings and the goodness of his uncle’s ladyfriends. As Wyatt develops a sense of who he isn’t, he must question who he is—and what he’s really worth.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

A tale of two brothers struggling to hold on to family and self in the face of a new life.

The older and smaller brother copes with his size by learning to channel rage. Eventually, he would turn to prize fighting as an outlet. The younger, studious brother becomes part of the boxing team but also observes the changes in character as fame and wealth intrude into their lives.

Tyrone Fallon is a boxer. He is a contender. Tyrone is the local boy; he is meeting "King" Billy Mason for the British Featherweight crown. Trufax is a tough Yorkshire town and the locals are rooting for their boy against the title holder. But there is another person in the ring with Tyrone - his dead father, and the weight of his past. Tyrone is fighting more than Billy Mason; he is fighting his own ghosts, his own demons.

Set in the tough world of professional boxing, this is a sensitive and profound examination of one man's life, centred around just one fight.

During his boxing career, author Philip McGrath fought two men who later fought for the World Feather Weight Title - Floyd Robertson and Rafui King. While at light weight, in a black and white televised fight he fought Maurice Cullen, losing on points, and also beat the Canadian Champion Eddie Beattie at Wembley.